Economic activities are underlying in all societies, and multiple connections exist with all the other domains considered in this project.

Within this section, the relationships of the economic field have been investigated, checking a wide scope of drivers, through both scientific literature and documents issued by the most important economic institutions.

Nevertheless, some of the links identified have been changing since the economic downturn that began in 2008, due to the collapse of US private financial system. Thereafter, consequences spread worldwide and the role governments have been playing until then has changed, as public resources have been diverted to balance negative effects. Moreover, forecasts about the evolution of the economic cycle are even more complicated today through the budget crises of countries belonging to the Eurozone.

To fill the gap of the information found in the older literature, the project team put a thorough effort looking for other and more recent documents properly depicting the current scenarios; in such a sense, effort has been devoted to presenting how the links among variables have been modified, even though they are hard to disentangle, as straightforward clues of an economic recovery are not yet identifiable.

Variations of the growth rate (namely in terms of GDP) have effects on many of the drivers introduced (e.g. employment, investments, trade, energy consumption, etc.); on the other hand, this variable is influenced in different manners. How the population is structured and its size, the level of education, the scientific advancements, public and private investments are examples of drivers that may either support or slow down an economy, behaving as endogenous factors.

The purpose of this section is to analyse the role the economy plays as dependent variable belonging to a long chain of interconnected relationships, both upstream and downstream.